1995

A lad insane
January 6
Not exactly your plum New Year's assignment, Jody Ericson spent the holiday in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, trying to understand what it was that caused John Salvi to spray a Brookline abortion clinic with machine-gun fire, killing one person and injuring three others. What she came away with was even more questions, even more complications in what seemed a simple religious-fanatic case.

What if the alleged shooter fired for a reason we'll never be able to comprehend because it reaches back to his childhood and his confusion over his sexuality? And what if all this confusion climaxed a week before the murders, in a blow-out with his parents and Salvi's losing his first real job sweeping up hair at Eccentric Hair, a salon in Portsmouth, New Hampshire? If the scales of sanity tipped for Salvi and he snapped, then his victims were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the line between righteous villain and psychotic killer is blurred.

The rights Mann
January 20
There may be no two more notorious names in recent Rhode Island legal history than those of four-time murderer Craig Price and credit union embezzler Joseph Mollicone. They were both defended by the same lawyer, Robert Mann. Jody Ericson looked at what made the eccentric legal eagle tick.

Last year Price was sentenced to seven years in prison for threatening a guard. The state, swept up in a public and political outcry Mann calls the "McCarthyism of the '90s," was hell-bent on concocting ways to keep Price locked up. When Price was charged with murder in 1989, Rhode Island law did not allow for juveniles to be tried as adults. That law has since been changed, but as Mann saw it, Price served his time. He took the universally loathed young man's case on principle. "It's not just Craig Price's rights I'm fighting for," Mann says, "but everyone else's."

Police force, continued
January 27
When yet another possible incidence of police brutality was caught on tape in mid-January, Providence Police Chief Bernard Gannon took quick action, suspending the officer responsible without pay. One problem: the Fraternal Order of Police -- thems that call you up every year for a donation -- quickly and overwhelmingly gave Chief Gannon a vote of no confidence. Lisa Prevost and Steven Stycos said that the protection of the bad cops with the good was an ugly pattern for the union.

Every time another incident arises -- like the police beating of a student at Mount Pleasant High School in 1992, or parental complaints about excessive force used by police to break up a fight at Hope High School last year -- the momentary expressions of outrage are quickly overpowered by the union, which routinely puffs up its chest and rallies around its accused.

Not playing it safe
February 17
After the initial epidemic-like AIDS scare of the mid-'80s, aggressive AIDS education in the gay community caused a drastic decline in the rate of HIV transference among gay men. A decade later, Jody Ericson noted how, partly because of quality AIDS education, a new generation of gay men were participating in unsafe sex.

Barraged with AIDS information and complimentary condoms, many gay men tuned out to the "play it safe" message years ago. Like gunfire in war, the threat of HIV is something they have grown dangerously accustomed to. After all, how many patches can you read on the Names Quilt, how many times can you chant "Silence = Death" before the tragedy becomes ordinary?

Big in Japan
March 10
What exactly do Japan and PVD's alt-rock scene have in common? We both love Velvet Crush. And while "we're huge in Japan" sounds like a Spinal Tap-esque death knell, it represented a fair taste of success for the local boys. Crusher Ric Menck told Michael Caito about turning Japanese.

"If you could see it you wouldn't believe how weird it is. Playing four nights in Tokyo, these huge places, having people mob your car. It would be a terrible way to live your life. I don't know if I'd wanna be like Tanya [Donelly of Belly]. She has to deal with so many creeps now. Imagine having to deal with that every time you went somewhere. It's freaky and people do weird-ass things."

To the X-treme
June 9
You know, "extreme" sports were actually at one point a new and exciting thing, and the Biggest Little, which hosted the first two editions of the ESPN X-Games (nee Extreme Games), was at the forefront of the mushroom of Xing popularity. Lisa Prevost brought us a bit closer into the "fray."

Here's how the mind of an "extreme" athlete works. When street-luge racer John Frey talks about the bad part of his sport, he does not talk about the time his aluminum sled went off a mountain road in Tennessee at 65 miles per hour, slammed into a boulder, and sent him flying into a muddy ditch that saved his life. No, the bad part about street luge racing, Frey says, is the police, who constantly run him and his fellow speed demons off their favorite hills with the lame excuse that they're obstructing traffic.

TV or not TV
August 11
Michael Caito tunes in to EBN's
static-free programming.

Founding Emergency Broadcast Network members Josh Pearson and Gardner Post are our friends. Important friends. People we definitely want on our side when things go wrong. Guys who realize the importance of spin control. Guys who lay down some mad hip-hop, techno and rap beats. Guys whose mistrust of the media is even greater than mine, which takes some doin' . . . They're fighting flame with flame, in a phat binary way, using the latest technology to lampoon, parody and otherwise burst the bubble of the manipulating media. Of television, of politics, of the Top Ten. By claiming to be media manipulators themselves, they offer an invaluable insight into what could very well happen, and indeed what has already happened, when lemmings on the couch, Dorito-stained clickers in hand and Reeboks laced to obese feet, stop giving a darn.

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